NOMINEE FOR VETS CABINET POST HID INFORMATION LEAK TO KOREAN

WASHINGTON -- Edward J. Derwinski, President-elect George Bush's choice to head the new Department of Veterans Affairs, concealed for more than five years that he had leaked confidential information in 1977 to a South Korean diplomat -- a leak that federal investigators say could have cost the life of a Korean intelligence officer who defected to the United States.

Derwinski, who served 24 years in Congress as a Republican from Chicago, publicly denied the charges when they were raised in 1978. Acknowledging his friendship with anti-Communist governments, including South Korea's, Derwinski dismissed the leak charges as "guilt by association."

He declined to testify before a federal grand jury that investigated the matter, and he gave no statement to the House Ethics Committee, which also looked into the episode. Both inquiries ended inconclusively as officials said that pursuing them could disclose sensitive "sources and methods" of the U.S. intelligence community.

But the unpublished record of a 1983 congressional hearing shows that Derwinski then admitted that he did pass word to a Korean diplomat in a phone call.

"This guy (the Korean defector) would have been severely punished or killed, as well as his family," a senior law enforcement official said recently, noting that Korean CIA agents arrived at the defector's home a half hour after FBI agents had escorted him to safety.

The September 1977 phone conversation between Derwinski, who was in his congressional office, and the South Korean Embassy was recorded by U.S. intelligence and helped spark the subsequent investigation. During the call, Derwinski leaked word of the planned defection, government sources said.